BITE Insight

Picture an ad for tights and what do you see? Svelte, perfectly smooth legs, impossibly long and, more often than not, pictured without a face or body to accompany them. The legs become an object and the tights a mere adornment.

RAPP have worked with the hosiery brand Heist to bring to life their mission to totally reimagine the tights category, with the help of some disruptive marketing.

The marketing for the tights needed to be at odds with the everyday sexual and sexist imagery that is regularly used to showcase bodywear and lingerie.

For the campaign, #WhateverYou, legs were swapped for fruit. It's a bodywear campaign with no bodies, tapping into the reality that people, and their legs, come in all shapes and sizes.

The campaign allows the conversation to centre around a body’s personality and form, without an obsession with appearance. Pineapples were used for prickly moods and watermelons for ageing skin.

The tights were designed to appeal to every single person, whatever gender, size, shape they identify themselves as. There wasn’t a focus on binary ideals, as around 10% of Heist’s clientele identifies as male, but rather on the inclusivity of the brand.

In a world where advertising encourages the objectification of bodies, Heist and RAPP’s campaign is a fresh new take on bodywear marketing. As Heist maintains, the “objective is never to objectify”.

About the author

Izzy Ashton, Writer/Researcher, BITE, Creativebrief

Izzy is a writer/researcher for BITE, Creativebrief’s daily insight into global marketing trends and the cultural movements driving them. She keeps abreast of the latest communication, technology and consumer news, and is responsible for conducting interviews with key agency strategists and creatives to gain insight into the most innovative global campaigns.